How much earth does man need?

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How much earth does man need? ( Russian Много ли человеку земли нужно?, German transcription Mnogo li tscheloweku semli nuschno? ) is a short story by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy . It was first published in 1885.

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The farmer Pachom buys a piece of land and becomes a landowner. He is "proud and happy". But his sense of property is awakened. He is feuding with his neighbors because of minor damage to the fields they have suffered at his field borders. He is also being robbed. He cannot convict the thief and his complaint is dismissed. “Now Pachom was quarreling with the judges and the neighbors. The peasants threatened him with the red rooster. So Pachom had enough space on his property, but the community was getting too tight for him. "

Eastward, inland, good land can be bought cheaply. After checking this rumor, he sold his property and settled four hundred wererst east of the Volga . Pachom now lives “ten times better” than before. But there are richer farmers than him. In the urge to enlarge, he falls out with his neighbors here too. Then he heard from a traveling merchant that one could buy good steppe land cheaply from the Bashkirs , even further east. Pachom and his servant travel five hundred weres to the steppe inhabitants. He is welcomed in her tent camp and is allowed to buy as much land as he can walk around from sunrise to sunset. With the assessment of his future possessions, however, Pachom overestimates his strength. He collapses dead from exhaustion after he has finally walked around a very large piece of land because he last ran in despair when the sun was setting. "The servant took the hoe, dug a grave for Pachom, exactly as long as the piece of earth that he covered with his body, from foot to head - six cubits - and scratched him."

interpretation

Earth is a term overloaded with symbols. Here it stands not only for land ownership, but also for material possessions in general.

The comic tragedy of Pachom lies in his one-sided values. He regards only possession as worth striving for. Other goals, such as intellectual property, i.e. education, or gaining entertainment value from life, as the city dwellers manage to do - his sister-in-law, who lives in the city, reports on them - he does not know or does not want to get to know. “'It's all true,' he said to himself. 'Our one has to do with the earth from childhood, and that is why such follies never occur to him.' "

He also lacks the talent for modesty, or to put it another way: He lacks the sense of what is appropriate for him, for realistic self-assessment. He has neither a feeling for the limits of his physical performance, nor for the limits set by the imponderables of fate. “If I had enough land, I didn't fear anyone, not even the devil.” There's something proud about this challenge. No wonder the devil who hears this will trip him up.

The simile, timeless truth of the novella prompted Stefan Zweig to add it to the stories of the Old Testament . The title with its meaningful question has become a standing formula, a winged word with which the striving, even greed, for property is questioned.

Radio plays

filming

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg filmed the novella in 1968 with Walter Buschhoff and Nicoletta Machiavelli in the leading roles under the title Scarabea - How Much Earth Does Man Need? .

German-language editions

  • How much earth does man need? German by Alexander Eliasberg . Pp. 115-133 in: Gisela Drohla (Ed.): Leo N. Tolstoj. All the stories. Fifth volume. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1961 (2nd edition of the edition in eight volumes 1982)

Remarks

  1. ↑ To light his house.
  2. ↑ 400 werst are 427 kilometers.
  3. ↑ Zweig, Stefan: Three poets of their life: Casanova Stendhal Tolstoi. Leipzig: Insel 1928, p. 261.

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